Jetpack 2.1: Tiled Galleries

Posting photo galleries on your WordPress blog is a fun way to share your experiences with the world, but do plain old thumbnail grids truly express your artistic side? No, they don’t. That’s why we’ve added tiled galleries to Jetpack.

Tiled galleries allow you to create beautiful photo mosaics for your blog posts. Just activate the Tiled Gallery module (and optionally set the tiled layout as the default) to create gorgeous galleries in seconds. Your friends will envy you, and your enemies will fear you.

You might be thinking, “Are tiled galleries the only new feature in Jetpack 2.1? If they are, that’s certainly understandable, because it’s an amazing addition to an already feature-rich plugin.” No, tiled galleries are not the only new feature; we’ve also added a slideshow mode for galleries. Just choose Slideshow from the Type dropdown when creating your gallery, and you’ll instantly have a dynamic photo display. Slideshows and tiled galleries both look amazing on mobile devices, and they both integrate seamlessly with the Carousel module.

In addition to giving you new ways to show off your photographs, we’ve spent a lot of time fixing bugs, too. Photon, Infinite Scroll, Publicize, Sharing, and the Contact Form modules have all been given some TLC, and the Custom CSS editor has been updated. For a complete list of changes, see the changelog.

Update: Jetpack 2.1.1 has been released to fix a bug that was preventing updates from Jetpack 1.9.2 and older.

One more issue, the gallery no longer fills the content space. When I was using the gallery previously with a three column layout it would fill the content space. Not I would say it fills about 2/3 of the width and the thumbnails are smaller. The layout is nice, but why are the images smaller? Can this be changed in the settings?

There are no current plans to add Facebook Comments or a sidebar social sharing widget to Jetpack, but we like hearing about the features you’re interested in. Thanks for the questions and the note about the gallery!

First make sure you have enabled Tiled Galleries on the main Jetpack page in your dashboard. Then you should see a dropdown for it on the right when you created a new gallery. This help page has a screenshot showing how it should look: http://jetpack.me/support/tiled-galleries/

I usually include one, maximum 2 images in every blog. Is it possible to have all the images in each blog be part of the gallery? Also I have activated the function in the settings but I would like to know what is the next step. Does the gallery go into a separate page? Should it be a widget and if so where should it be placed? If the questions appear naive I am one such. Thank you.

All the images in each blog post can be part of the gallery, but you need to insert them as a gallery instead of individual images. You can add a tiled gallery into a post or page. Start with this page which has some screenshots and links to help you: http://jetpack.me/support/tiled-galleries/

Could you guys add a new feature to WordPress or Jetpack the allows you to use a full image as a background option instead of the tiled version for example as you scroll down the page the picture doesn’t move or change. I hate the tiled look.

Tiled Gallery widths match the $content_width variable which can be set in your theme, however, note that setting is for the width of the entire post. Currently, there is not a way to change the width of a tiled gallery separate from the width of a post, but it’s in our plans to try to come up with ways to improve how it works in a future update.

We rely on volunteers for many of our translations. You can find out how to participate here and the Jetpack translations are here. Once a language is translated, it is included in the next major release of Jetpack. I checked for JP, and I found that it is already 100% translated, so you will see those updates appear in version 2.2.

Reblogged this on Legend of Velda and commented:
I have no words for the awesomeness of the new Tiled Gallery Jetpack Module. I can’t say how many times I’ve sat there playing tetris with images trying to make them lay out neatly together. This does it Automattically! And yes, this was already available at WordPress.com. I’d seriously considered moving a few of my WordPress.org blogs here *just* for the sake of making prettier galleries. Well, that and the WordPress.com reader, and the awesome reliability and support… well, you get the idea 😉

Incredible! I’ve had a “2012 — The Year in Photos” blog posting sitting in draft mode because I wanted a way to do EXACTLY what this Jetpack update does. It’s like the WordPress developers are reading my mind.

I love this new feature!! Playing with it all day today! So beautiful! Thanks heaps for the hard work!

One question though, I understand how the images layout is automatic. Is there a way I could somehow control it a bit more? For example, I have two large panoramic images plus a few standard size images added to the gallery. The panoramic images shrink to very small size that they are ‘buried’ in the tiles, it loses the panoramic effect.

The only way to adjust the tiles is to change the order of the images in the gallery. You do make a good point about panoramic images, and we’ve decided to add it to our planned future updates to see if we can get panoramic images to go full-width more often in the future.

Yes, but note that you must have either checked the Settings → Media option to make all galleries tiled by default or you must use the correct parameter in your shortcode (such as type=”rectangular”) if you haven’t modified your Settings → Media options.

I was wondering if it would be possible to set the height on the slideshow (all of my images are 980×310), but there is an additional 40px in height at the top and bottom, rather than the 28px at the sides. Many thanks! 🙂

I’ve been using the new galleries a few days now and I’m wondering if there is some sort of performance penalty related to them?

For example, when my page loads for a second the images are stacked vertical and maybe in different sizes before they assemble into place. I’ve never seen this behavior from the original gallery presentation. Also, some of the images are obviously larger than thumbnails which would be more bandwidth intensive (but probably worth it).

It does take additional processing for the tiled gallery script to rearrange the images and stack them into place. I don’t see them assemble for my galleries like you have described, but I do think that could happen if you have a very large number of images in a gallery or if you are on a very slow internet connection.

I’m wondering if there’s enough processing that this might be a liability in how Google measures load time? Or maybe it doesn’t impact load and arranges after it’s in? Are the thumbnails larger in size than the traditional thumbnails? Hm.

I don’t think the processing time to rearrange the images into tiles is enough to worry about. After checking an example page on your site, I found that you loaded 535.7KB of JavaScript alone just for just the one page load, and only 3.7KB of that was the tiled gallery script. You may want to load less things overall as everything you’re adding to your pages is probably what is adding up and causing slow loading in this case.

A good deal of my ad-related Javascript is loaded asynchronously, fyi. Also, while I do agree my site could be better optimized (by taking a pay cut), I’ve never see this slow loading of full size images or prior galleries. Wonder if there could be some js conflict and/or if images are cached, etc. Also, are the images actually resized to these new dimensions or is it the full sized image? Anyhow I know we’ve taken this offline to discuss, thanks for your assistance!

When using the rectangular mode (or tiles), you cannot set the number of columns yourself—the columns are decided by the gallery. You can set the size of the gallery, but not the individual images, by changing the $content_width setting in your theme (using the function you mentioned).